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Twelfth Night at Donmar Warehouse – Review

On October 24, 2002April 30, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Mendes bows out brilliantly

By Charles Spencer | October 24, 2002 | The Telegraph

As Shakespeare wrote elsewhere, parting is such sweet sorrow, and I am not ashamed to admit I had a lump in my throat as the cast took their calls at the end of Sam Mendes’s farewell production at the Donmar.

It was partly because of the moving depth of his staging of this most bittersweet of Shakespearean comedies, but it was also the memory of Mendes’s tremendous achievement here over the past decade.

It is 10 years to the day since he reopened the Donmar with the British premiere of Sondheim’s Assassins, since when he has scarcely put a foot wrong. The theatre became fashionable under his directorship, but the buzzy atmosphere was always founded on excellence. From Friel’s Translations to Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room, from Electra to Privates on Parade, the Donmar has an unparalleled track record in great shows brilliantly staged.

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Dead Gorgeous Print Media

Dead Gorgeous Review

On October 22, 2002May 16, 2021 By Gingersnap4Helen No Comments

Wartime Friends Trapped in Loveless Relationships

by Owen G | The Guardian | October 22, 2002

ITV’s heavily promoted one-off wartime drama, Dead Gorgeous, starring Fay Ripley, left viewers cold last night with 1.5 million switching off during the course of the programme.

The two-hour epic, in which Ripley co-starred with Helen McCrory as a pair of wartime friends trapped in loveless relationships, started off with 6.6 million viewers at 9pm.

But by 10.15pm, the number watching had dipped to 4.8 million, leaving the drama with an average of 5.5 million viewers, one in four of all those watching.

Read the rest of the original article at The Guardian

Print Media Reviews Uncle Vanya

Uncle Vanya at Donmar Warehouse – Review

On September 19, 2002May 1, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

An all-star Cast Perform at the Donmar

by Steve Schifferes | September 19, 2002 | BBC News Online

Helen McCrory, Mark Strong, Emily Watson and Simon Russell Beale

It was luvvies night at the Donmar in London.

The small foyer was crowded with stars as Hollywood film director Sam Mendes launched his last series of plays at the small theatre where he has made his name.

And he did not disappoint them, producing a spectacular version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, played (as it should be) as a black comedy and paired in repertoire with Twelfth Night.

Simon Russell Beale played Vanya as a bumbling fool, just as he played Hamlet a few years back in a famous production at the National.

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Interviews Print Media Uncle Vanya

Mendes’s Dream Team

On September 3, 2002April 15, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Helen McCrory talks to Jasper Rees about her roles in Sam Mendes’s valedictory double bill at the Donmar Warehouse

by Jasper Rees | September 3, 2002 | The Telegraph

It’s only French actresses who will tell you in that detached, nonchalant way of theirs that, yes, they are beautiful. British actresses are more used to telling you that they’re not.

Take the following strident example. “I think I’m very lucky not to be beautiful,” says Helen McCrory. “I know more actors unhappy about being beautiful than the other way round. I find it really baffling, this modern obsession with people wanting to look good on screen or on stage. Why? Why?” She spits out the words. “I’m an actor, not a model.”

The oddity is that McCrory plays a lot of beautiful women. Yes, she took her first big lead in the television film Streetlife as an owl-eyed, bleach-blonde, child-murdering single mum on a Cardiff sink estate. But her square cheekbones and violently black eyes are better known to television viewers as the face of Anna Karenina, the most head-turning woman ever to hurl herself under a train in the pages of a classic novel.

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Platonov Print Media Reviews

Platonov at the Almeida Theatre – Review

On September 20, 2001May 14, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Anton Chekhov in a new version by David Hare

by Philip Fisher | British Theatre Guide

“My life is in ruins and all you can do is joke about it”. This sums up the effect that Mikhail Platonov has on everybody that he encounters. There are four young women in this play and each of them falls desperately in love with the eponymous hero. After a brief spell of great happiness, suicidal disaster inevitably follows.

The set for David Hare’s new version is designed by Paul Brown to fit in the larger auditorium at the Almeida King’s Cross. It is one of the most impressive that can ever have been seen on a stage in England. In part, this is because the old railway sheds that make up the Almeida’s temporary home are so wide. It is possible to contain within the space a field of sunflowers, a wooden bungalow that also symbolically looks like a mausoleum, a garden, a stream which suddenly yields up a railroad track and the edge of a wood.

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